Sharon Alker is assistant professor of English and General Studies at Whitman College, USA, and Holly Faith Nelson is associate professor of English at Trinity Western University, Canada.

Contents: Preface; Scottish romanticism and the working class author: an introduction, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson; Hogg and Scott's 'first meeting' and the politics of literary friendship, Peter Garside; National discourse or discord? Transformations of The Family Legend by Baillie, Scott and Hogg, Meiko O'Halloran; Fanaticism and enlightenment in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Ian Duncan; Robert Wringhim's solitude, Gillian Hughes; The labourer and literary tradition: James Hogg's early reading and its impact on him as a writer, H.B. de Groot; James Hogg and the authority of tradition, Suzanne Gilbert; James Hogg: Scottish romanticism, song and the public sphere, Murray Pittock; Singing 'more old songs than ever ploughman could': the songs of James Hogg and Robert Burns in the musical marketplace, Kirsteen McCue; Hogg's bardic epic: Queen Hynde and Macpherson's Ossian, Douglas S. Mack; The perilous castle(s) of The Three Perils of Man, Graham Tulloch; 'Perfectly ludicrous': the game of national meaning in The Three Perils of Man, Caroline McCracken-Flesher; James Hogg and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: buying and selling the Ettrick Shepherd, Thomas C. Richardson; Empire and the 'brute creation': the limits of language in Hogg's 'The Pongos', Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson; Hogg and the American literary marketplace, Janette Currie; Bibliography; Index.